Wireless communication terminals have to be equipped with a display screen as well as with receiving and/or transmitting means, more specifically antenna means. It is important that the display means are able to present optical information with a high resolution and a high quality. It is however also important that the receiving and transmitting capability is good. It is furthermore desirable to be able to provide a good coverage of all possible directions for the relevant radio communication channels. In communication networks it is also desirable to be able to provide a good data transmission capacity, both for single links and for the radio network as a whole. It is however difficult to fulfil these objects with known arrangements. Moreover, it should be possible to exploit the potential receiving/transmitting capacity as much as possible. Therefore a terminal unit may be equipped with multiple antennas which couple independently to the different degrees of freedom of the radio channel. For a single wave, the degrees of freedom are basically the direction and the polarization whereas in a real channel, a transmitted wave is scattered by physical objects in the surrounding environment resulting in a so called multipath channel. This means that there will be many different pathways corresponding to different directions, at the receiver as well as at the transmitter. To fulfil (also) these objects is even more difficult, or impossible with known arrangements. It is known to, for example on a laptop, use the frame surrounding a laptop display for an antenna means. However, the available space is then quite limited and it becomes difficult to take full advantage of the data transmission capacity as well as to handle real multipath channels. Furthermore, since the available space is limited, it is not possible to position antenna elements to an extent and with a variety as would be needed for many applications, particularly for advanced wireless communication systems or high speed wireless communication systems which require multiple antennas or antenna arrays. It is particularly difficult to provide sufficient coverage of all possible directions.
As an alternative to use the frame, it is known to use the backside of a laptop display for antenna placement. If the back of the screen of for example a laptop is used, the antenna elements will be screened by the display in the opposite direction. Since the radio paths having the best gain typically are concentrated within a limited angular range, if the back of the laptop is directed away from this angular range, the strongest paths will be heavily attenuated, which is a serious problem. This problem will be even more pronounced for future high speed wireless communication systems.
Thus, none of the suggested solutions is satisfactory for the reasons given above.